Tristan Copley Smith

Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters that for the last two years has been creating the Global Village Construction Set, an open source, low-cost, high performance technological platform that allows for the easy, DIY fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a sustainable civilization with modern comforts.

The GVCS lowers the barriers to entry into farming, building, and manufacturing and can be seen as a life-size lego-like set of modular tools that can create entire economies, whether in rural Missouri, where the project was founded, in urban redevelopment, or in the developing world.

Open Source Ecology is accelerating the growth of the next economy - the Open Source Economy - an economy that optimizes both production and distribution - while promoting environmental regeneration and social justice. We are building the Global Village Construction Set. This is a high-performance, modular, do-it-yourself, low-cost platform - that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different industrial machines that it takes - to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts.

"To get to a more complete vision of the commons in industrial manufacturing, the Open Source Ecology movement presents a radical proposal. “Imagine if you could build cars, industrial robots, engines, and other things in your own back yard. The only problem is, these require billions of dollars of infrastructure in the current industrial system. Not for long – if we succeed with the Open Source Micro-Factory.” Marcin Jacubowski and a growing community around the world is contributing to this vision. Their first objective is to produce the 50 tools for producing most products for modern comfort – the “Global Village Construction Set”.

In short, OSE bases on freedom, open development and self-sufficiency. Local communities are started, working together through global networks. Their principles include ecology and design for durability and reuse (modular, standardise, repairable, …). Also on the level of exchanging products and services with the market, their business plans and knowledge is shared with other groups who would like to follow the example. They call it the “distributed enterprise”. The resulting machines are around 8-10 times cheaper than off-the-shelf industrial versions – but may require self-assembly. The factory model they are working on is one of maximum flexibility, while aiming for efficiency and high performance. We could call it a job shop, or microfactory." (http://microfactoria.wordpress.com/2012/06/04/free-knowledge-and-commons-perspectives-for-industrial-production/)

A history of the rise and fall of Sloanist mass production, and a survey of the new economy emerging from the ruins: networked local manufacturing, garage industry, household microenterprises and resilient local economies.The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto by Kevin A. Carson — Reviews, Discussion, Bookclubs, Listsand ...This book explores the impact of dramatic technological and social changes on work and manufacturing. Kevin Carson uses real-world examples and theoretical insights to illuminate the conflict between two economies: one a highly-capitalized, high-overhead, and bureaucratically ossified conventional economy, the subsidized and protected product of sustained collusion between big government and big business; the other a low capital, low-overhead, agile and resilient alternative economy, outperforming the state capitalist economy despite being hobbled and driven underground. The Homebrew Industrial Revolution explains clearly and powerfully why the alternative economy is winning–and why we should welcome its victory.Center for a Stateless Society » Support C4SS with Kevin Carson’s “The Homebrew Industrial Revolution”and ...

KMO talks with Kevin Carson, author of The Homebrew Industrial Revolution about the technologies that seem poised to end the dominance of capital-intensive production methodologies and brake the stranglehold that capitalists and the government minions hold over our lives. Author Jeremy Rifkin describes the current state of human affairs as the transition from the Second to the Third Industrial Revolution.